JTAG has been, since the early days of phones, the surefire (and in most cases) the only possible way to bring a device back to life after a flash gone wrong (used to be really common back in the WM days). Nowadays, Android devices are actually rather sturdy in the sense that you can flash virtually anything to these devices and would be easy to revive. This happens to be the case for a lot of Samsung Galaxy phones. However, there are still ways to turn your shinny Galaxy into a shinny paperweight. However, JTAG boxes are usually very expensive and you will likely not be able to make one yourself, or so we thought until we saw this thread made by XDA member AdamOutler. Apparently, the dev is rather familiar with electronics and has taken it upon himself to revive his dead Captivate. In this process, he created a very informative thread in which he includes a design for a circuit, which will enable this functionality. The key thing about this is that because of the proximity of the pin connectors, in order to make this, you had to have very good soldering skills. Thanks to a rather ingenious circuit design, this is no longer the case. The dev has also provided the most recent pin outs for you to try this out yourself.

Please look throughout the thread as it has tons of very useful information (and it is not a long read either with the thread being about 5 pages long). Trying this in your device may result in complete death of your device and even personal injury if you are not careful with a soldering iron. Please leave some feedback if this is of any use to you.

I think we may have a way to recover any phone with around $40 in hardware (including an Arduino ATmega, a 150Kohm resistor, and a micro usb cable) and no special skills aside from soldering to a USB cable.... Which is nowhere near as difficult as soldering to these microscopic connections.

I need to brick my phone in order to test my theories. If my theory is wrong, then I need to bring it back to life. JTAG, being a tried and true method will serve the purpose well. My plan is to brick my phone every which way from sunday and come up with ways to bring it back using the microusb cable. If I do something really crazy, then I need the JTAG backup.

You can find more information in the original thread.

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Thanks Adam for the tip!